[RFC] Modern profile fields in 3.1

[Ger]

Facebook is of course widely used, but there are also many users that don't have Facebook. Also, there are countries that block social sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Besides: on forums that target a less internet-adapted audience (like one of my boards), all that social sites doesn't make sense anyway.

My suggestion would be provide some standard profile fields (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Pinterest, Google+) but deactivate all of them by default. An administrator can choose whether or not to activate them by a mouseclick. That way, boards at which they don't make sense aren't cluttered with it while boards that do use them, can easily activate the appropriate fields.

[imkingdavid]

Facebook does not make much sense in most cases imo.

Why?

Agreed; Facebook is used by as many, if not more, people as Twitter. I don't see why we would include Twitter but not Facebook.

[nickvergessen]

My suggestion would be provide some standard profile fields (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Pinterest, Google+) but deactivate all of them by default. An administrator can choose whether or not to activate them by a mouseclick. That way, boards at which they don't make sense aren't cluttered with it while boards that do use them, can easily activate the appropriate fields.

I like this idea

[Pony99CA]

My suggestion would be provide some standard profile fields (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Pinterest, Google+) but deactivate all of them by default. An administrator can choose whether or not to activate them by a mouseclick. That way, boards at which they don't make sense aren't cluttered with it while boards that do use them, can easily activate the appropriate fields.

I like this idea

Which is basically making those profile fields CPFs anyway, so it should be done as suggested in the RFC that Bantu linked to. There should be a default set of CPFs that are disabled by default ( and maybe which can't be deleted, just disabled, to avoid people accidentally deleting them).

Also, it sounds like MSN (WLM) is still going to be available in mainland China, so that should be a custom profile field, too, disabled by default. You don't want to tick off two billion Chinese.

I have added "IM/Chat services" to my New Custom Profile Field Types RFC to cover those items. Things like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest should be covered by my suggested URL type (although I've modified it to allow an image/icon instead of text).

Given the previous two RFCs, I think that this RFC is redundant (although the discussion is certainly warranted somewhere here), but if you want to discuss which services should be "standard" here, that's fine.

Steve

[MichaelC]

+1 to removing WLM, ICQ, AIM and AOL and adding FB, Twitter, Skype & +1.

Jabber is used for notifications which is still used by some people instead of email (as it's faster).

Maybe we could have a look at adding IRC somehow?

[Pony99CA]

AOL and AIM are still used (somebody linked me to an AOL discussion once and I was surprised how many people were still there). MSN sounds like it will be used in China. So, again, deprecate the fields (meaning don't show them by default/disable them), but don't eliminate them.

Another reason to keep them is to allow phpBB 3.1 migrations from phpBB 3.0 to keep all of the user data.

I support making all current "standard" profile fields (except the registration ones -- user name, E-mail address, time zone, etc.) Custom Profile Fields, deprecating the "ancient" ones and adding "modern" ones (but allowing the admin to disable them). If it wouldn't hurt performance much, you could even make the registration ones CPFs, but obviously they couldn't be deleted or disabled.

It seems like adding a CPF_type field with required, standard and user-defined values would be sufficient, and the converter would move the fields in the users table to the new CPF fields with the appropriate type.

Steve

[keith10456]

While this solution is simple, I do not like it. I would prefer having all of those fields removed and replaced with custom profile fields. This however might require making the custom profile field framework a bit more powerful.

+1

Every website (admin) is different. What's good for one site may not apply to another. Options such as profile fields should be left to the respective admin.

[MichaelC]

While this solution is simple, I do not like it. I would prefer having all of those fields removed and replaced with custom profile fields. This however might require making the custom profile field framework a bit more powerful.

+1

Every website (admin) is different. What's good for one site may not apply to another. Options such as profile fields should be left to the respective admin.

Seemed to miss this reply.

+1. So that the user can specify a string which will then be added into a URL (using placeholders) and that shall be the url linked too with an optional button.

Except I'm not sure this would work with things like MSN/Skype?

[DavidIQ]

While at it there should be some option to require some fields during registration. Could also be used as a SPAM deterrent.

[Frug]

+1 for turning these special fields into custom profile fields.

From the moment I first started using phpBB years ago I thought it was strange that it had built in (hard coded) support for certain protocols that I couldn't get rid of. I still remember going into the old ACP and wondering where the delete button for these fields was. Of course I just hacked them out of the registration page and profile views, but I never liked the fact that they were hard coded into phpbb to begin with. Protocols come and go, some people have no use for them at all, they shouldn't be special in any way.